New York City Mayor Michael de Blasio travels from the confines of the Big Apple and his duties as chief executive of America’s largest city to advocate for a nationwide progressive agenda.
As outlined in the Huffington Post, his priorities are:
- Raise the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour.
- Reform the National Labor Relations Act to enhance workers’ rights.
- Pass comprehensive immigration reform.
- Oppose trade deals that “move power to corporations at the expense of American jobs, workers’ rights, and the environment.”
- Pass national paid sick leave
- Pass national paid family leave.
- Make pre-K, after-school programs and child care universal
- Expand the Earned Income Tax Credit.
- Allow students to refinance student loan debt.
- Close the carried interest loophole.She has said she wants to close it.
- End tax breaks for companies that ship jobs overseas
- Implement the “Buffett Rule” so millionaires pay their fair share.
- Closing the CEO tax loophole that allows corporations to take advantage of “performance pay” write-offs.
Noticeably absent in that list are key topics that should be the concern of a big city mayor, such as combating local crime, reducing unemployment, and easing traffic, all significant problems that should command his attention.
Murders in New York City are up 20% in 2015, according to the New York City Police Department.
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Two-thirds of student test-takers in grades 3–8 didn’t meet state standards on the English language arts (ELA) and math tests,
New York ranks among the worst U.S. cities in traffic congestion .
And then there is the issue of taxes. In addition to New York State’s already high taxes, the city itself imposes a personal income tax. As noted in Forbes, “Very few other U.S. cities assess individual income taxes and/or business income taxes. (Pennsylvania and Ohio have local school taxes on earned income but the rates are fairly low, except in Philadelphia.) Many investment advisers and professionals moved their residences and businesses to Connecticut where the top tax rate is 6.5%, saving 10% of their highest-marginal income.” If you own an unincorporated business, there is a special tax on that, too.
Some of the Mayor’s national ideas are harmful to his constituents. Allowing more illegal immigrants into the nation at time of high unemployment places downward pressure on wages. Increasing the minimum wage encourages companies to move their operations overseas.
Emphasizing spending on “progressive” issues at the expense of basic services such as having a sufficient number of police on patrol threatens to make municipalities unsafe. The residents of cities run by “progressive” mayors are noticing.
Joel Gilbert, who researched cities run by progressives, described what he found in a WND interview: “In my journey through America …I met a lot of people living in horrible conditions, particularly African Americans, who I was surprised to learn were now staunch conservatives as a result of living in progressive-controlled cities like Detroit, Chicago and Newark,” Gilbert said…After 60 years of progressive politics in their cities, they understood very clearly that they had not been progressing but rather regressing all this time, and they were mad.”
Indeed, a recent Quinnipiac poll notes that de Blasio’s overall approval ratings have dropped to 44%, a particularly low number considering his landslide victory in the last election.
Here is a breakdown of the ten cities with populations above 250,000 that have borne the brunt of long-term rule by progressives, as outlined by Frontpage:
St. Louis’s poverty rate is 26 percent overall; Newark, New Jersey’s poverty rate is 26.1; The residents of Cincinnati, OH are afflicted by a poverty rate of 27.4 percent overall; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 28 percent of city residents overall live in poverty; Milwaukee, Wisconsin sports a poverty rate of 29.9 percent overall; In Buffalo, New York, 29.9 percent of residents overall are living below the poverty level; El Paso, Texas, one-in-four live in poverty; In Cleveland, Ohio, 36 percent of its residents live in poverty; And then, there is Detroit, Michigan, in a class by itself, with 36.2 percent of residents living in poverty; Camden, New Jersey rounds out the top ten, with a poverty rate of 42.5 percent.
The National Review notes that American cities “are by and large …monopolies generally dominated by the so-called progressive wing of the [Democrat] party. The results have been catastrophic, and not only in poor black cities such as Baltimore and Detroit. Money can paper over some of the defects of progressivism in rich, white cities such as Portland and San Francisco, but those are pretty awful places to be non-white and non-rich, too: Blacks make up barely 9 percent of the population in San Francisco, but they represent 40 percent of those arrested for murder, and they are arrested for drug offenses at ten times their share of the population.”